meSkipper

How long to prepare for the boat licence exam

The answer depends far more on the licence than on you, because the amount of material differs hugely between them. Here is how to work it out for yourself.

There is no single number, and anyone who names one does not know you. But there is something you can measure: how much material there is. And that differs a great deal between the licences.

How much material there is, in practice

  • Mashit 11 — 161 questions in a single bank.
  • Mashit 13 — 223 questions in a single bank.
  • Mashit 12 — 315 questions in a single bank.
  • Mashit 30 — 883 questions across five separate banks, each an exam in its own right.

Mashit 30 has 5.5 times the material of Mashit 11. That, not talent, explains most of the difference in preparation time.

One way to divide it up

The material here is already divided into 67 topics — groups of dozens of questions around a single theme: navigation lights, sound signals, the fuel system. One topic is a sensible unit of study for one sitting.

  1. Read a topic — all its questions with the answers, in one go. It is quicker than it seems, because the questions keep coming back to the same rules.
  2. Practise it straight away — with feedback after every answer. What did not sink in while reading becomes clear in practice.
  3. Move on to the next topic, and go back to the previous one only if you still have not mastered it.

After five or six topics, stop and take a full mock exam, even if you have not finished everything. At this stage it is not meant to give you a good score but to show where the gaps are — and from there the weakness analysis can point you in the right direction.

How to know you are ready

Not by feel, and not by how many days you have put in. Three measurable signs:

  • Two consecutive mock exams above the pass mark — not one.
  • The exams were taken against the clock, in the exam’s format, not in practice mode.
  • On the failing topics your result is 100%. There, ‘almost’ is the same as failing, so this is the sign worth checking last.

Reach all three and the exam will not surprise you. If you have not, you know exactly what is missing — and that beats another week of general reading.

And the one thing not to cut short: the mistakes everyone makes are worth five minutes’ reading before you start, not after.